Writing on Writing, Blindness, Science, Music, TV and Film, Meaning and Story

Menu

Eleven is When We Waved Goodbye

I was eleven. I loved things that not everybody loved, like thunderstorms and rainy days, winter, outer space, darkness and the feeling of mystery. I thought about things I read, either for school or for fun, and pondered them long after I’d finished the book. I thought over events in my life the same way. I looked for meanings, for connections, reasons, patterns, philosophies. I had a lot of thoughts and a lot of feelings and I was always exploring them, taking them deeper, writing them down. On Saturday mornings I woke up early and sat in bed writing stories. I was just starting to figure out who I was. I felt vivid, like a full moon in a sky full of identical stars.

We lived in New Jersey, much closer to all our relatives up in Connecticut, because the FBI transferred Dad for the second time. When our parents weren’t home, Randy and I played out a kidnapping case that Dad had worked on, acted out the story of the man abducted in his driveway and left in a box to starve to death. We talked about it nonstop even though our parents had told us we couldn’t tell anyone at school about the case, and made our baby-sitters promise not to tell.

~~~

This is an excerpt from a chapter that may or may not make it into Moonchild, a memoir (Read description here). Though the narrative focuses mostly on my freshman year of college, there were a few things I wanted to introduce from earlier life, and this is the intro to one of them.

Emilia Judith Jordan

Emilia Judith Jordan is albino, which means her hair and skin are paler than pale, and she's legally blind. She is a writer--of memoir, personal essay, fiction, screenplays and TV scripts--and a music fanatic, a science girl, an occasional dabbler in the metaphysical and a person who watches copious amounts of TV (read: way too much), for writing insights of course.